Lu Chaoyang Called "Quantum New Drugs" a Packaged Product at the 2026 Bund Summit; Califano Calls Cancer "Quantum" as an Analogy

Quentir Medicine Monitor

Evidence-based insights for quantum medicine.

In September 2026 the word "quantum" reached medicine from two directions, and the contrast is instructive for anyone who buys for a hospital or a drug company. In Shanghai, the physicist Lu Chaoyang told the 2026 Bund Summit that some Chinese companies sell "quantum new drugs" as finished products while leading research teams still offer prize money for a practical quantum algorithm. In New York, Columbia University published a feature on 26 August in which the cancer biologist Andrea Califano called cancer a "quantum disease", a comparison with electron energy levels and no quantum hardware in it.

Califano's phrase points at two Nature Genetics papers, a pancreatic cancer dataset of hundreds of thousands of single cells, and a testable count of six cell states. The quantum new drugs that Lu Chaoyang objected to are described in a Xinmin Evening News commentary of 11 September as marketing, and the commentary supplies no product-level evidence for a buyer to assess. It also asked why the correction had to come from a scientist and why no industry regulator has set a standard for what a company may call quantum. That is the question a buyer should put to a vendor before any contract is signed.